10 Ways to Automate WordPress Tasks on Your Site

Last updated on: March 1, 2018

There’s a lot of work to be done when your website is up and running – content creation, maintenance, security checks, malware cleanup, backups, comments moderation and more. The good thing about it is that you don’t have to do it all by yourself. There are tools available to help you automate WordPress tasks, and using these tools you can automate a good part of website management. Without wasting time, let’s find out the ways you can automate WordPress tasks to save yourself some time.

1. Updates

Updating your WordPress is important for both website security and performance. WordPress releases updates regularly and they show up as notifications on your dashboard. When you choose to automate WordPress updates they’re pretty much taken care of in the background, saving you productive time.

By default, minor updates to WordPress happens automatically, though that’s not the case with major updates. When it comes to themes and plugins, automatic updates is disabled by default. It’s possible to tweak options or use a bit of code to turn on or off automatic updates to the core, themes and plugins. Our Quick guide to Updating WordPress can help with this.

You can also turn on automatic updates using Easy Updates Manager – all in one go or selectively. This plugin overrides all updation related settings. It allows you to manage all updates to the WordPress core, themes and plugins, development updates, translation updates as well as some third party plugins.

2. Backup

Backups are really what let you sleep at night without being anxious about your website. How often you back up your site depends on the frequency with which you post content. It’s a good security habit to set up a schedule for backing up your site. That’s not all, you should keep multiple copies of the backed up versions at different locations and test them once in a while.

If you’re not on a managed hosting plan, plugins are your best options for backing up WordPress. BackupBuddy can backup your entire WordPress installation, and you can set up backup schedules to run automatically. You can store the backups in a secure off-site location and restore them as and when required.

3. Schedule Posts

Did you know that it’s not necessary for your to be logged into your WordPress to publish content. WordPress has inbuilt features that allow you to publish a post at any scheduled time you want.

Once you complete a post, look for the Publish option in the post editor and click on the Edit link. After that, you can specify the date and exact time when the post is to be published. If you wish, you can also reschedule posts. While you can do this for any number of posts, it’s not a good idea to schedule too much into the future. You may need to change the schedule to suit the relevance of the post to the time of publishing.

If it’s a plugin you prefer, try the free Editorial Calendar. It allows you to simply drag and drop your ready-to-publish posts into a scheduling format. You’ll also have an overview of the scheduled posts and be able to manage your drafts and your posts from multiple authors, view the status of each post and make quick edits to them.

Another option is CoSchedule, a premium plugin that not only allows you to schedule publishing posts, but also auto publishes to social media. Find out more about building an editorial calendar in this post.

4. Social Media Auto-publish

Much of the social media posting can be automated. You can arrange it so that your social media accounts are updated, and your content is shared on different social media platforms automatically. You can also automate WordPress RSS feeds, after formatting them for social platforms.

Ideally, automating social media posting should form part of your overall social media strategy. It allows you to take a break from social media without readers missing your presence. For more help with automating WordPress social media tasks, look up our earlier post.

One plugin that can help here is the Revive Old Post plugin. After a one time setup, it automatically shares both new and old content to your social network accounts.

5. Stop Spam

Spam can be a drag on your SERPs. However, spammers are a determined lot, they’ll always look for ways to get into your site. That’s why WordPress has pre-installed their powerful Akismet anti-spam plugin in every WordPress download.

After installing WordPress, you’ll need to activate the plugin and obtain an API key. Thereafter, the plugin regularly checks for spam in the comments and contact form submissions.

But if you’re not a fan of Akismet, you should know there are other plugin options to prevent WordPress spam as well that ones that can deal with login attempts, subscriptions, registrations, bookings and more.

6. Compress Images

All those glossy images on your site – they need to be compressed before you upload them to your media library. Byte heavy image files can slow down your website. Plugins like Short Pixel Image Optimizer and EWWW Image Optimizer allow you to compress images automatically while uploading them to the media library. They can also compress images currently existing in your WordPress.

7. Database Optimization

As you add more and more content to your website, the database can begin to bloat. An important part of routine website maintenance is to clean up your database regularly. A bloated database slows down your site, while a lean database is more efficient in responding to queries.

You can rely on WP Optimize to clean up the database for you as often as you want it to. You can customize what needs to be cleaned and configure it to clear out redundant data. To make sure your data stays safe always, you can set the plugin to automatically save a backup to UpdraftPlus before optimizing your database.

8. Communication

A good part of our time goes in writing mails to our team members and collaborators. You should try Slack, an online productivity tool that helps to streamline communication among all your online communities, organizations, groups and media accounts from a single place.

Making it easier for WordPress users are plugins like Slackbot that act as a channel between your WordPress and Slack account. Besides, you can set up custom notifications in Slack for different WordPress events such as updates, user registration or publishing a post.

Slack works just fine with social media platforms like Twitter and Dribble as well as apps that track website performance or uptime. We’ve done a post on integrating WordPress with Slack, so you can read up more about it there.

9. Content Creation

Sounds unbelievable doesn’t it, that you can put content creation on autopilot. While in many cases that’s not really a good idea, it can take the strain off content creation for some sites which exist mostly to curate content from multiple sources. Autoblogging plugins like WP RSS Aggregator can help you to aggregate content and publish it automatically.

What’s more, the plugin is easy to setup and configure and can be deactivated when not required.

How to Automate WordPress Wrap-up

Once you start to automate WordPress tasks, do check in on them from time to time to be sure they are performing as intended. While these plugins are all great ways to automate WordPress and free up your time for more productive work (like creating quality content) you still need to double check for plugin updates and compatibility (if you’re using more than one plugin).

What other tasks would you like to automate with WordPress? Or are there any key automation plugins you simply can’t live without? Let us know in the comments section – we’d love to know how you’re managing your site.